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Saturday, October 04, 2008

3Di moves OpenSIM into Enterprise mode

Last year many of us thought that Second Life would be the virtual walhalla for companies to conduct business. Yet over the past year, we've seen that in many cases a public, open world does not work out for businesses. ABN Amro was among the first to acknowledge that they needed more privacy with their customers and went to Active Worlds. Meanwhile IBM has been working on getting Second Life ready fit for business and made succesfull attempts to get Second Life running behind a Firewall. A parralel track has been the development of Open Sim, a reverse engineered open source version of Second Life.

Regarding the Open Sim project, 3Di, a Japanese subsidiary of the NGI Group, announced yesterday that they will be releasing an Enterprise version of Opensim. Based upon 3Di technology it is a reworked and extended version of Opensim, and prepped with additional tools and support under the name 3Di Opensim Standard.

Virtual World News has the following thoughts on this special Enterprise version:

"There's already been significant development on OpenSim, on both a consumer level and, as in IBM's integration with Lotus Sametime, for business. OpenSim itself is available as server software, so I'm interested to see what 3Di's model is to set its own software apart. Either way, I look at the commercialization of OpenSim as a pretty big step towards adoption.

It seems like 3Di's target audience is "corporations and academic institutions" looking to create their own virtual worlds. Possible use cases cited include real estate showrooms, education, and offices for collaboration. All of that would be much simpler with the browser-based interface 3Di is developing, but, as a feature, that's shared with all OpenSim worlds and, eventually, other platforms as well. It's not unique, but the upside of that is that it should help build an install base." (read more)

3Di Opensim Standard version 1.0 runs on Windows Server 2003 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (with Mono support). Requirements include a dual-core 2Ghz processor or better, 4GB of RAM and 10GB of hard-drive space. Standard Second Life (or compatible) viewer software is required to connect to and use the virtual environment.

3Di Opensim Standard appears to go for a little under $5,000USD.

More info is hard to find as 3Di operates a fully Japanese website, illegible to us US and European bloggers.

1 Comments:

$5000 for the server code? Wow considering OpenSim is FREE, that's a tidy profit, if they're basing their code on OpenSim. I hope you get a LOT for your money... free support, bugfixes, patches, etc. I'm just reeling in shock at $5,000 versus FREE. WOW.